All Policy is Local: The GOP's new take on pre-K

It was business as usual for a Democrat when Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis rolled out a plan for expanding preschool — until her opponent, Republican Greg Abbott, hit back with a pre-K platform of his own.

Tots don’t vote — but increasingly, pols are looking to them to score points with voters. In Texas, Davis attacked Abbott’s proposal on the grounds that it would mean standardized testing for 4-year-olds; Abbott has been lampooning Davis for not having a cost estimate for her proposal, presumably an expensive one.

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Democrats including President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have embraced pre-K in their platforms for years. Now, Republicans are getting on board, in conservative Southern states like Georgia and Alabama, Midwestern right-to-work states Michigan and Indiana, and in some instances on Capitol Hill. Some Republicans who have rejected taking federal dollars for Medicaid expansion are comfortable vying for federal pre-K money.

In Texas, having two candidates duke it out over how to make pre-K better is ultimately “a win-win,” said Steve Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research. Though their approaches differ, both are making promises that would benefit young, low-income kids.

And pre-K could be a winner for a governor or future presidential candidate looking to paint himself or herself as ideas-driven and to cut into a Democratic opponent’s pull with swing voters, said Kevin Madden, an ex-Romney campaign adviser and executive vice president at JDA Frontline.

“Democrats have gone head-first into this economic inequality or economic opportunity argument,” Madden said. “Republicans feeling a need to engage can look at this — at the education issue and at early childhood development — as an area where they can have an impact.”

Former Obama campaign manager Jim Messina, who has pulled pre-K into Democratic campaigns in recent years, was more blunt: “This issue is one [Republicans] almost have to move on before the next presidential campaign,” he said at a recent event hosted by early childhood advocacy group First Five Years Fund.

Momentum is building among red-state governors. Mississippi, South Carolina and New Mexico are among the states that made large investments into pre-K last year. Republican governors in a slew of other states — including Alabama, Georgia, Indiana and Nevada — also have been pushing the issue. And several governors considered potentials for a 2016 White House bid, including Mike Pence, John Kasich and Brian Sandoval, are lining up behind the pre-K cause.

Sandoval, who has pulled for more funding for pre-K especially for English-language learners and built up a new ratings system to help boost preschool quality, has pledged to focus more on pre-K if he wins reelection this year. At a recent National Governors Association meeting, Sandoval — whose state has been passed over for the Obama administration’s Race to the Top early learning grants — asked Education Secretary Arne Duncan about his plans for next year’s funds.

There’s a broader ideological argument for a strong conservative approach to preschool. “There’s not much in the Republican Party for the working class, and especially the lower-middle class,” said Ron Haskins, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and adviser on 1996’s welfare reform, which also created today’s main federal child care program. Pre-K taps into issues of fairness and self-reliance, Haskins said.

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, who campaigned as “one tough nerd,” fits this mold. Snyder, who is running for reelection against former U.S. Democratic Rep. Mark Schauer, has boasted about his record on funding pre-K and K-12 education in an ad out earlier this year. Schauer has called for expanding pre-K so it’s eventually accessible for all 4-year-olds if he’s elected.

Snyder touted Michigan’s Race to the Top early learning grant in his State of the State address earlier this year. The grant “shows you we’re being recognized as among the best in the country besides the biggest,” Snyder said, “so we’re going to keep that up.”

Boasting about pre-K could prove to be a smart move in Michigan, where voters recently ranked education as the second-highest priority for the state behind repairing roads, and ahead of jobs and the economy. It could serve a second purpose for Snyder, too: pivoting conversations away from the right-to-work legislation that hit teachers’ unions in the state.

Women and Hispanic voters consistently rank education high on their list of priorities in polls. And pre-K — in the limited polling that has been done — appears to have potential. Respondents to a January 2014 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll ranked “Ensuring all children have access to pre-school education” as the third-highest priority for the federal government for 2014, behind job creation and reducing the deficit. In a Quinnipiac University poll on New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s proposed pre-K expansions, 71 percent of Hispanics surveyed said they believe universal pre-K would be “very effective” in improving education for children in New York, compared with 65 percent of Democrats and 55 percent of the total population.

Republican Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, facing a challenge from ex-Gov. Charlie Crist, has heartily embraced pre-K as part of his education platform and touted it to the state’s large Hispanic community. A Spanish-language ad rolled out by the Republican Party of Florida zoomed in on Scott’s push for an increase to preschool funds during the last legislative session.

Scott and others successfully fought for an increase in pre-K funding in the last legislative session — the biggest boost in years. He’s made the rounds at a children’s museum, and at a preschool in a Cuban neighborhood in Miami, where local newscasters described him as playing a “kindly abuelo” to kids while he rubbed elbows with state early childhood leaders.

“Florida ranks first in the nation for access to free prekindergarten,” Scott tweeted recently, “We need to keep it that way.”